Far Afield by Susanna Kaysen

  Jonathan wasn’t exactly envious. Plenty of women had nuzzled up to him or sent nuzzlesome glances his way. The difference was that he didn’t take advantage of it. Partly because he considered it “taking advantage of,” partly because of his distaste for entanglement, mostly, he now decided, because he was a Puritan. He didn’t think of love-making as a sport. Heðin did, and so did a number of Faroese girls.

  All this was bound to make him think of Daniela and, eventually, talk about her, though with trepidation: perhaps Heðin had banged her too? He had not; he didn’t even know her. But he knew of her family. He put his nose in the air and sniffed, pan-cultural shorthand for snobbiness.

  “Oh, no, she’s very friendly,” Jonathan said, not wishing to remember that she hadn’t been.

  “Yah, to an American writing a book.” Heðin sniffed again. “What was it like with her?”

  “We didn’t.…”

  “Then you must telephone and invite her to come for a visit, so you can have a good fucking. I will find out her telephone for you.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Jonathan. It appealed to him immensely.

  “Why? You are writing your book, you are cousin to my family, you are my friend, all you need is a woman.”

  Jonathan had to admit to himself that this was true. “She has a job,” he said. “It would be hard for her to visit.”

  “Pah!”

  So much for the vaunted equality of the sexes in Scandinavia, babbled about in the Danish guidebook—and at Cambridge dinner parties. But Skopun generally seemed to have one foot in the Bronze Age; Jonathan had thought of calling his book Viking Village.

  “When the nights get long, you’ll call her,” said Heðin.

  But the nights and the days were still balanced in harmonious intervals of stars and scudding clouds dappling the faraway sky. Jonathan going about his work was sometimes troubled by an image of Daniela, sometimes had an arrow-sharp memory of that kiss, but most of the time he pretended she was Christmas or his birthday: inevitable, possibly fun, and fixed in the future. For he had reached that condition of contentment in which he was aware of being happy, and he wanted nothing to disturb it.

  Into this calm, mid-month, something odd intruded.

  Though the weather had been generally fair, a little spatter of storms had buffeted Skopun for a weekend and given Jonathan a cold. For a few days he took notes between snorts, but the wet phase passed quickly, leaving stalactites of snot that pricked when he breathed and that could be removed only in private by delicate, persistent excavation. He was at this one evening, flipping through his notes and picking away, when he felt a rush of liquid course down the back of his throat, nearly choking him. He spat: blood. Not a thin, mucusy stream but a dark red glob. Frightened, he blew his nose, gently: more blood, fresh, wet, as if his nose were an open vein. He dashed upstairs to the bathroom to look at himself in the mirror. He was pale, and a steady flow was leaking from his nostril, inching its way toward his lip. His blood tasted sweet and alien. It was coming at him from two points, trailing down inside and out, so he sampled it both hot and cold.

  The first rule with blood was to put your feet up, according to Gerda; Jonathan remembered lying on the living room rug with his legs on the sofa after he’d skinned both knees falling off his bike. With toilet paper pressed to his nose, he lay down on the bathroom floor and put his feet on the toilet seat. His floor, he saw, could do with a sweeping: Band-Aid wrappers, strands of hair, a dead spider and a living one were all within an inch of his head. He looked out the window instead, looking at the stars blurred by the pane until he thought it safe to stand up.

  The hemorrhage seemed to have stopped. He peered up his nose in the mirror and saw caked, black blood, but he couldn’t taste it anymore. Back at the kitchen table, he finished going over his notes and left his nose alone. By ten-thirty, when he was in bed with Dombey and Son (ordered by mail from Blackwell’s; received only seven weeks later), he’d brushed the episode off.

  But in the morning his pillow was soaked, stained brown and crimson, as if he’d been murdered during the night.

  Now Jonathan’s days and nights were haunted by blood. The pillowcase was an atlas of his sufferings; continents and islands formed nightly and were obscured by new ones rising the next night from the tide of his body’s salt water. He told nobody, though his anxiety mounted daily. And he feared a public outpouring almost as much as he feared the blood itself. Exposure, aside from the mess and embarrassment it would cause, would mean a doctor, and a doctor would mean a diagnosis, and Jonathan already knew the diagnosis.

  Clearly, he was dying. He had nose cancer; a tumor was pressing on his sinus, or some sort of rot was eating his insides and spitting them out as blood. At the very least, his nose was altered, and his days henceforth would begin with scrubbing his pillowcase and include many deft, furtive checks for blood with his fingers and his tongue—secret movements he’d already perfected.

  Thus, Jonathan at his worst. And it went further. He lost no time turning his happiness into the cause of his affliction. He was never meant for this busybody life he’d so enjoyed, therefore nose death was sent to cut it short. Whether he called it divine retribution or psychosomatic illness or his rotten luck—and he called it all of these—nosebleeds had scotched his newfound pleasure in living.

  He saw the humor in this black speculation, but that didn’t stop him from spinning it out each time he stood at the sink running cold water on his bloody linen. After eight days of this and of walking gingerly on the slick mud roads, with cones of toilet paper wadded into both nostrils, he decided he’d better confide in someone.

  Little Jens Símun appeared around seven o’clock with his usual refrain: “Aren’t you coming to eat?” Jonathan nodded and went upstairs to unpack his nose. Let his body speak for him. And between the halibut and the tea his nose began to bleed. He knew the sweet taste now and had learned to swallow whole gulps of blood, but soon he felt the warm, thick wriggle coming out his left nostril for all to see. He put his hand up to his face and then, shamed but urgent, held his red fingers out toward Petur.

  “Look,” he said.

  Petur nodded. “Your nose is bleeding.”

  “It keeps happening,” Jonathan said, his voice shaking a little.

  “Mmm,” said Petur. “I’ve heard of that.”

  “Ice is good,” Maria said.

  “Nah,” Petur said, “leave it alone.”

  “Sometimes it soaks my whole pillow. It’s been happening for a week.”

  “Like a woman, no?” Heðin put in, grinning. He leaned close to Jonathan. “I know what would cure it.”

  Petur laughed. “Young men,” he said. “Maybe it’s time you got married, Heðin, so you can pay more attention to your work. You are thinking so hard about women you get the lines tangled up. Soon you’ll be courting a codfish. Well”—he sighed—“I was the same.”

  “Papa,” Jens Símun piped up, “take me out in the boat with you. I won’t get the lines tangled.”

  “I only did it once,” said Heðin.

  “You have to go to school,” Maria said.

  “Soon,” said Petur. “Next summer, I’ll take you out.”

  “It’s boring,” said Heðin.

  “Can be,” his father agreed, equably.

  “You are not a fisherman,” said Jens Símun, fixing a fierce look on Heðin. “I am a fisherman.”

  “Our conservative party member,” Heðin whispered to Jonathan. “Everything traditional for Jens Símun Dahl.”

  Jonathan checked his nose with his forefinger while pretending to rub his eye. Heðin, astute, said, “Forget about it. It’s nothing. I have found her telephone for you.”

  Jonathan managed a little smile. “Maybe a doctor—” he began.

  “You have a nosebleed,” said Petur.

  And that was the end of it. Named, his nosebleed stopped. His pillow was dry in the morning—and dry the next three mornings. His nose r
esumed its minor role in life, and life resumed its savor.

  For instance, he had the pleasure of going into Sigurd’s store and hearing Jón Hendrik’s gruff welcome and invitation to “sit here by me,” which meant squatting on his heels till his ankles ached and listening to the old man’s mumbled gossip about Sigurd’s customers. That little toddler Sigrid took care of was Sigrid’s big sister Lisabet’s baby that she “got” from Páll who lived in Sandur; but Páll was engaged to another girl, in Klaksvík, so Lisabet had gone Down There (to Denmark) to work and find a husband, and her family took care of the baby. But that must have been a while ago, said Jonathan, because the little girl looked about two years old. Yes, Lisabet must be having a hard time finding the husband. Was she going to marry a Danish man? Jonathan wanted to know. Well, if that’s all she could get. And didn’t the family mind having to take care of a baby? No, she was a good girl, Petra, always stopped to say hello to Jón Hendrik, even though she couldn’t really talk yet. But the mother, Jonathan persisted, Sigrid and Lisabet’s mother, wasn’t it hard to have a little child around again? No, it’s good to have a baby in the house, said Jón Hendrik, shaking his head, as he often did, at the wonderful stupidity of the American.

  And that one—bobbing his chin at a roly-poly man who walked with a swagger and whom Jonathan had often seen on the dock, chatting with people who were baiting lines—what a lazy one! Talk and talk. What did he do for a living? Jonathan asked. Watch other people work, that’s what. Jens-Egg we call him, because he looks like an egg and because of a story. Do you want to hear the story? Of course, said Jonathan.

  Sigurd coughed and shuffled his feet in the sawdust, his signal to hold off until the person in question had left the store. Jón Hendrik obeyed these commands with bad grace. “Jens-Egg, hah, hah, hah,” he said, so that Jens-Egg would be sure to know he was up for dissection. Spitting, rearrangement on his box, and new wads of tobacco carried Jón Hendrik over until he was at liberty to speak again. Jonathan took advantage of these pauses to stretch his legs and eat a hunk of cheese. Each time Sigurd had a cheese order, he cut a piece for Jonathan too, and a row of Tilsit chunks wilted on the windowsill.

  So. The story was this: Jens-Egg was a rich man’s son. His father, jøgvan, had been the son of the King’s farmer here. He didn’t know what that was? That was a person who had more land, and also his land was all together, not in a little patch here and a little patch there. So he got more potatoes and it wasn’t so hard to plant and harvest them, because they weren’t all spread around. Jonathan looked confused. Jón Hendrik spat and explained. When you got married the woman brought a little land from over here, where her father had a piece of land, and the man had a little land over somewhere else, and then those little pieces of land had to be divided up again more for the children later on. But not King’s land; that didn’t get divided. So. He was son’s son of the last King’s farmer.

  “There aren’t any now?” Jonathan asked.

  Jón Hendrik growled with irritation; he hated to be interrupted in his stories. “We are independent,” he said firmly.

  So. Notwithstanding Jens-Egg’s wealth—and King’s farmer families were always wealthy—he was greedy. Or maybe that was why he was greedy. Anyhow, during the war—

  “The Second World War?” asked Jonathan, knowing he risked another growl but intent on facts.

  “The English war,” Jón Hendrik answered. “When the English came.”

  Jonathan nodded; that was the Second World War. He scribbled. Jón Hendrik spat. Then they got back to business.

  So. During the war he had chickens. He was a young man then, not yet twenty. He had chickens and he had feed for them too. Most others didn’t have feed, so they ate their chickens early in the war. Then they didn’t have any eggs. Everybody was hungry. Here he paused, scanning his memory of hunger. We ate scallops!

  Jonathan didn’t know the word. “Draw it.” He offered his notebook. Jón Hendrik drew a nice portrait of a scallop shell and made a face of disgust. “In America we like those,” Jonathan told him. “We pay a lot of money for them.”

  Jón Hendrik stared. What a country! “You eat them now, after the war?” Jonathan nodded. Jón Hendrik shook his head. Well. He had eggs. He hoarded them, though. He buried them in a barrel of peat ash in his basement. You can keep an egg that way—but not for as long as Jens-Egg kept them. He waited until everybody was very hungry, then he began to sell those eggs. Some of them were like rocks. But what was there to do? We were sick of those scallops. So he got richer, from selling his eggs. So he’s Jens-Egg.

  Then there were the more complex and sociable pleasures of the dock, where Jonathan went after lunch. Small boats that had set out from Skopun before dawn were returning then and the fish-plant workers were straggling back in to the briny tables where they sliced four fillets a minute. Those who from age or disinclination did not work were gathering in a line by the railing to watch for the mail boat, due in at three.

  Jonathan on the dock was Jonathan at his best. He was a good hand at unloading and stacking; he’d learned to fasten quickly a line thrown at him from a bow and to ask, with the correct offhandedness, “How did you do?” He could stand comfortably alongside the village elders rolling the occasional cigarette and commenting on the color of the sea and the sky, the prospects for storm, the likelihood that today Ami’s new toilet would arrive from Tórshavn. He was no longer the nincompoop underfoot or the possible spy from America (two of his earlier assignments). He was not even the Scribe of Skopun anymore, it seemed. Since his reprieve from death, Jonathan saw himself, and felt himself seen, as one of the guys.

  An odd guy to be sure, but everybody had quirks. He didn’t know everyone’s name, but neither did Elin’s new husband, Jákup, who was trying to get Jens Símun to buy a boat with him—well, that was a stupid idea, because Jens Símun hated to go fishing and he already had the boat with Petur. But he’d learn. (Jonathan listening to this marveled at the intricacies of language: Jonathan would learn the names, Jákup would learn the names, and Jákup would learn to give up on his boat project.) He was writing that book, but writing that book was a good idea, and maybe you’d have to come from outside of Skopun to have that idea. (Jonathan was pleased to know that America, once as far away as the moon, was now in the same universe as Klaksvík or Vestmanna: that is, the Outside of Skopun universe rather than the Down There universe, which commenced at the Faroes’ disputed three-hundred-mile fishing limit and radiated into the depths of the Milky Way.) He wasn’t married, but they could fix that. And hadn’t he met some pretty girl in Tórshavn? Heðin said—well, Heðin said a lot of things about women—yes, but he’d said that Jonathan had met a pretty girl. (Jonathan blushed.) Anyhow, plenty of young men didn’t get married until they weren’t so young anymore. He had to finish the book first and get rich, so as to marry a rich pretty girl.

  This public discussion of his characteristics was the clearest sign that he’d been accepted. The old men mulled over each other’s traits and habits daily, poking each other with their sharp old elbows as they delivered especially insightful comments. That guy walks just like you—poke—like he’s two years old with his pants full of shit. And closer to the bone. One rheumy old guy about another who could barely stand up: I think he keeps living just to spite his daughter. He never wanted her to marry Arni, so now he’s making their lives miserable by being so sick. Poke.

  The day citizenship was thus conferred on him, Jonathan went home in a very good mood. The three-o’clock boat had brought a letter from one of his classmates who was just now heading into the jungle, having spent months preparing his supplies and making his arrangements. Reading about mosquito netting, malaria pills, snake-venom kits, antifungal foot creams, the need to start the day by shaking the scorpions out of your shoes, and the difficulty of getting permission to travel from the torpid bureaucrats at provincial headquarters made Jonathan kick up his heels with pleasure at his own situation. He was in the absolutely perfect p
lace. He looked out his kitchen window to the purple ocean that was the backdrop to the red-roofed church and snug clusters of houses; he leaned against his kerosene stove, dependably pumping warmth into his home; he wriggled his toes in his pest-free shoes; he contemplated his high-protein dinner, his neighbors who cared about him, his bulging notebooks. Somehow, he had lucked out, and he bent his head toward the dusky sky in brief but heartfelt thanks.

  When he lifted his head he saw Sigurd coming toward his front steps, tugging a sheep. Another phone call, Jonathan figured. Perhaps Daniela had thought about him as much as he had thought about her? Which wasn’t that much, he emphasized to the inhabitant of the sky, in order not to jinx his prospects. Sigurd was trying to coax the sheep to walk up the steps and failing. The sheep had dug itself into the ground with its front feet and lowered its head ominously.

  “Hey!” said Sigurd. He had hold of the sheep by its ear.

  Jonathan opened the front door.

  “Help me with this,” Sigurd said.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Pull it up the steps.”

  Jonathan pulled and Sigurd pushed, and they got the sheep into the kitchen in short order. It stood there shaking with confusion, moving its black, soft nostrils in a frantic but silent effort to understand its circumstances. Jonathan was puzzled too.

  “What are you doing with it?” he asked.

  “It’s yours. It’s your sheep.” Sigurd sat in a chair and sighed.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, really you’re only entitled to half a sheep, but we thought it would be welcoming for you to have a whole one, and then, you don’t go out fishing, and we wanted to be sure you had food for the winter. So we decided you’d get a whole one. Jens Símun decided.”